Flat Earth Conspiracy

Until recently, I thought Flat Earth societies were making an ironic political statement about Anti-Vaxxers or Creationists or Neoconservatives or Young-Earthers or maybe just Betsy DeVos, this being a far-more logical conclusion to me than assuming an earnest conviction that the Earth is a flat disk. I love Terry Pratchett, and Diskworld is a great series, but nobody could possibly believe it‘s non-fiction, right? Then I Googled it.

When I was a kid, my dad watched In Search Of, a show hosted by Leonard Nimoy that “portrayed unusual natural phenomena and 'investigated' the paranormal” [IMDB]. I watched it with him, and I was amazed (and sometimes a little scared) by the stories. Nimoy added a compelling gravitas to segments about stuff like Big Foot and spontaneous human combustion.

Googling Flat Earth was a little bit like watching In Search Of, but without Leonard Nimoy. Google can find zillions of pages with science info articles ‘proving’ that the Earth is flat, that the sun and moon move around the sky on giant, clock-like hands, that mainstream science lies to the masses with math. Also, Game of Thrones got it wrong. The giant wall of ice is in the South, around the outside edge of the disk. I presume the wall keeps everything from falling off and hitting the turtle.

There‘s a larger mountain of round-earth evidence (read “credible evidence actually exists”): pictures, descriptions of repeatable experiments, elegant mathematical models that accurately describe the orbits of satellites, eye witness accounts from astronauts, eye witness accounts from people who've flown high in planes, GPS . . . . Just saying, there's lots of Round-Earth evidence.

All this evidence might just put Flat-Earth theories on shaky ground. So how does a steadfast Flat-Earther level the evidentiary playing field? For starters, admitting that Round-Earth evidence might be valid is against the Flat-Earth Prime Directive. Okay, but if the world is flat, how does so much Round-Earth evidence exist? A conspiracy. The World's governments have conspired to lie about space travel, lunar exploits, mars probes, and the shape of the world.

Isn't it obvious what must have happened? In the early 1950's, with the Cold War really starting to heat up (um, freeze up?), the Soviets and Americans signed a super-secret treaty requiring the signatories to lie to the world about space travel and the actual shape of the Earth. Since then, some 38 other nations, including China, Syria, and Israel, have become signatories to the treaty in order to get to pretend that their citizens have been in space.

My first exposure to a conspiracy theory was from my Great Grandmother. She didn't believe that Apollo astronauts ever went to the Moon. She thought the Moon landings were filmed in a Hollywood movie studio. My Great Grandmother was born before the airplane was invented, so one can understand her having a certain amount of doubt about ‘flying’ to the Moon. She knew the earth is round.

Not long after I first googled ‘flat earth’ I noticed a documentary on Netflix entitled Behind the Curve. Behind the Curve is a look at “a small but growing contingent of people who firmly believe in a conspiracy to suppress the truth that the Earth is flat.” [IMDB] The program looks at various aspects of Flat-Earth culture including possible psychological reasons for believing the Earth is flat since there aren't physical ones. This isn't a critical review, but the movie was an interesting look at stuff.

When I started watching Behind the Curve, I knew with certitude that I would NOT start believing in conspiracy theories. This, I must now confess, is not entirely true. I do now consider that there may, in fact, be a grand Flat-Earth conspiracy. No, not that one. The Earth is an oblate ellipsoid. It has an equatorial radius of 6 378 137.0 m and a polar radius of 6 356 752.314 245 m (according to the World Geodetic System 1984). [Wikipedia] It is orbiting the sun—a much larger ball—at an approximate distance of 499 light seconds. That is settled.

My potential unicorn, i.e. possibly-true conspiracy theory, is the one where people who know better conspire with a select few others to take advantage of fringe segments of society in order to get on TV and sell T-shirts. ARG! It took roughly 65 years to get from Kitty Hawk to the Moon and another 50 to get me watching charlatans on Netflix pushing BS we as a species have known better than since 500 BCE. How about we stop the backslide and continue reaching for the moon. We made it once, even if my Great Grandmother didn't believe it.